Friday, October 30, 2009

Though Cowards Flinch And Traitors Sneer. . .

Against the lies and the bullying of the objectively pro-fascist "left," Maryam Namazie, Peter Tatchell, and the Antideutsche Tendency hold the old flag high.

Here's Namazie - a leading voice for Britain's Equal Rights Now and the One Law for All Campaign, a democrat, secularist and a member of the central committee of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran - on the degeneracy of the European 'left':

"It is an anti-colonial movement whose perspectives coincide with that of the ruling classes in the so-called Third World. This grouping is on the side of the ‘colonies’ no matter what goes on there. And their understanding of the ‘colonies’ is Eurocentric, patronising and even racist. In the world according to them, the people in these countries are one and the same with the regimes they are struggling against just as the ‘Muslim community’ here is one and the same with reactionary Islamic organisations, Sharia councils, and parasitical imams. Which is why at Stop the War Coalition demonstrations, they carry banners saying ‘We are all Hezbollah;’ at meetings they segregate men and women and urge unveiled women to veil out of ‘solidarity’ and ‘respect’."

The brave gay rights activist and socialist Peter Tatchell, meanwhile, is being subjected to a dirty smear campaign at the moment. Accused of "gay imperialism" and worse, Peter has been slandered and traduced by so-called "anti-war" noisemakers who are circulating the outright lie that they are being "censored" and that a book containing a chapter subjecting Tatchell to "anti-imperialist" criticism has been "banned." In fact the book's publisher, Raw Nerve Books, has now confessed that the criticism of Tatchell it published was just a collection of slanderous abuse.

The chapter contains "serious, defamatory untruths" about Peter and his comrades in the gay rights' group OutRage!, and the authors falsely claimed that Peter is "Islamophobic." The publishers further concede that it is a lie that Peter equated Muslims with Nazis, and he never “collaborated with the extreme right,” never “participated with several racist and fascist groups,” never “employed tactics of intimidation and aggressive divide and rule,” and that the "gay imperialism" chapter attacking Peter circulated malicious gossip arising from a sectarian political vendetta. "We accept that Mr Tatchell has never criticised Muslims in general, only Muslim fundamentalists – in the same way that he has also criticised all other forms of religious fundamentalism, Christian, Judaist and so on. . . The insinuation that he is anti-Muslim is untrue."

For years, Peter has been targeted for violent attack by the far right because of his anti-racist activism, and now Peter is being targeted for attack by dirty little blackshirts who have passed themselves off as "progressive" and have successfully affixed themselves in positions of leadership in the "anti-imperialist" camp, owing solely to their pedestrian use of the "left-wing" lexicon.

In the German case, there is a hopeful response. In Rosa Luxemburg's Corpse: The Stench of Decay on the German Left, 1932-2009, Jerzy Sobotta observes: "The Gulf War in 1991 and the resulting pacifist or even pro-Hussein sentiments of the broad German Left produced an insurmountable gap between Anti-Deutsch and other leftists. . . Most recently, in the wake of the anti-Semitic attacks of 9/11 and in the face of the fraternization of the global Left with the Ba’athists in Iraq and Islamists in Afghanistan and Palestine, Anti-Deutsch concluded that solidarity with Third World movements is solidarity with barbarism. Emancipatory, communist critique had to be articulated against the Left. . . . The only question that matters: How could it have been left to rot for such a long time?"

Sometimes, it's just fuzzy thinking and the counterculture's lingering liberal-bourgeois tendency to faint at the feet of any radical-chic windbag making the rounds of the celebrity circuit. Jonathan Steele is decidedly less than impressed with Princess Di's latest incarnation:

"What diminishes [Malalai] Joya are frequent lapses into a self-righteousness that alternates between sectarianism and bombast: 'When I speak around the world, I represent all the suffering people in every corner of my country.' The daughter of a resistance fighter who lost a leg during the Soviet period, she was educated in a Pakistani boarding school run by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). She remains under this secular madrassa's influence. Fair enough that RAWA and its many Maoist adherents would oppose the Soviet occupation. You did not have to be a Maoist to do so. The sad thing is that, even with hindsight, Joya has nothing good to say of the other secular modernisers whose desire to change Afghanistan was no different from hers, except that they felt they had to take Soviet backing in the civil war against the fundamentalists. Many Kabulis look back with nostalgia on these socialists who ran the country for three years after the Russians left and whose repeated offers of national reconciliation were spurned by the western-backed mujahideen. To Joya they are nothing but 'former Russian puppets'.

"She also criticises other secular anti-fundamentalists such as Sima Samar, the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and Ashraf Ghani, one of the leading candidates against Karzai in the imminent election. They are ruled out of court for once having served in Karzai's government."

Ah yes, but there is such virtue and righteousness in anti-imperialist uselessness, comrades!

4 Comments:

great piece terry. Unfortunately what has long been apparent to those of us who have been blowing this horn for some years now still seems to elude the majority of so-called progressives, including those here in B.C.

Off topic but tangentially related: I would imagine that many of the same so-called "progressives" are busying themselves "protesting" the Olympic torch and Games and boosting BC's reputation as a province of spoiled whiners. I put the "" in protest because for the life of me I can't figure out what they are actually demonstrating against. Perhaps Gaye McDougall of the UN should make an appearance at one of the torch protests as she seems to think that the Cdn "injustices" are just as or more worthy of her attention than what goes on in China, Burma, Zim, Saudi, Iran, etc. etc.